11 Visual Marketing Tips for Brands in 2023
Last update: 23 February 2024 at 10:07 am
3.00/5Digital marketers today are raving about visual marketing for all the right reasons.
Visual content marketing can create the most profound impressions on viewers, given that most humans are visual learners. Marketers use this fact to connect, engage, and convert their target audiences using various visual marketing content.
When Venngage asked marketers how crucial visual content was for their marketing strategy, 86% agreed it was necessary.
Internet users today want to consume more information crisply and engagingly.
Given that attention spans have shrunk dramatically in the past decade, visual content is the best way to command their attention. Businesses are increasing their digital marketing budget to invest more in visual marketing campaigns.
Create an Impressive Visual Content Marketing Strategy
A solid visual marketing strategy will help your target audience process your message faster and retain it better.
But how do you develop such a compelling visual marketing strategy?
Here are 11 practical and actionable visual marketing tips and ideas you can incorporate into your marketing campaign today and skyrocket your marketing ROI.
Establish a Theme and a Color Palette
While variety is the essence of life, many times, following a theme or color palette can help establish your brand identity.
It’s the easiest way to make your social media feed more impressive and colorful.
Moreover, sticking to a brand color palette will make your posts instantly recognizable to your audience.
The themes for your visual marketing can be determined based on your social media campaign or your brand’s general guidelines.
Whenever you create graphics, images, infographics, or videos for your brand, ask yourself: How do I make these visual elements stand out from the crowd?
Look at Lazy Dog Restaurants’ feed and see how all their posts draw your attention to one central theme—their menu.
Showcase Your Brand Wherever Possible
If you create engaging visuals, they will be shared or repinned by your audience. In that case, you must brand your visual content as it boosts your brand awareness.
Let’s compare IKEA’s Instagram post and Trek Bikes’s carousel.
Although both social media posts distinctly showcase their products, Trek Bikes has subtly showcased its brand name, which makes a huge difference.
There are several ways you can showcase your brand in visual marketing.
The simplest way is to add your logo or brand name in a corner or as a watermark. You can also shoot the products, making the brand name easily recognizable.
You should ensure that your logo is not obstructive and doesn’t clash with the color scheme of the visual content. If this is the case, opt for a greyscale or neutral style.
Leverage User-Generated Content
UGC, or user-generated content, has become more precious to brands than any branded content.
What’s the reason?
It is original, organic, and authentic. It also serves as excellent social proof for brands and allows them to bond with their customers uniquely.
If you desire to build a solid social media community, you can take your video marketing strategy to the next level by leveraging user-generated content.
Also known as earned media, you can feature unboxing videos, OOTD posts, makeup & product reviews, Google review widgets, and any other visual content your customers create in your visual marketing strategy.
Please look at how Apple showcases a video created by its user; in doing so, they have garnered nearly 650,000 likes.
It uses the best hashtag generator tools to create relevant hashtags that make the posts more discoverable.
Incorporate Text for Better Impact
An image can speak a thousand words, but incorporating text into an image can make it a lot more impactful.
Be it a banner or posts for social media platforms, a dash of text can elevate the visual content.
Visual marketing is about conveying more information or connecting deeper using visual elements. You can strategically place text on an image or video to achieve this goal effectively.
This image post shows that Nike smartly uses a punchline to celebrate the soccer champions.
That being said, you should refrain from using too much text as it would obstruct the visual appeal of the visual content and thus fail to engage the viewers correctly.
Create Interactive Content
Static posts are a thing of the past, and interactive content is the most significant marketing trend right now, according to HubSpot’s 2022 State of Marketing Trends report.
Why is such content gaining popularity? Because it draws the attention of the audience, invites them to participate, and delivers a two-way experience.
Visual marketers today can use this low-cost, high-impact content type to achieve multiple marketing goals:
- Increasing engagement
- Enhancing customer learning
- Collecting feedback
- Generating qualified leads
Focus on more than just social media platforms. Incorporating such visual elements in your blog posts is one of the dominant blogging trends you should pay attention to.
This post by Starbucks is an excellent example of interactive content. They have initiated a conversion leading to over 26k likes by asking a simple question.
You can try various visual marketing options, including polls, contests, shoppable videos, games, calculators, interactive infographics, PowerPoint templates, maps, and videos to enhance engagement like never before.
Experiment with VR Technology
Virtual reality or VR technology is here to stay. The VR market is all set for a big boom in the coming years, according to ARtillery Intelligence’s forecast.
VR has proven a valuable tool for digital marketers to deliver viewers a 360° immersive experience. While B2B marketers use this tech to give virtual presentations, and tours, B2C brands use AR to allow users to try their products, and so on.
As VR tech delivers an almost real experience, it is a fantastic way to interact, educate, and convert viewers into customers.
Let’s take, for example, this VR tour presented by Patron Tequila. Viewers are immediately drawn into their world and become a part of the story they are telling.
Showcase Real People and Places
How do you make your visual marketing content more relatable? It’s simple to humanize it.
You can take your visual marketing impact to a new level when your message includes real people and places.
Let’s say you are a B2B SaaS like Copper CRM. Including images of your clients and video, testimonies can make your presentations more authentic than merely written testimonies.
As you can see in this carousel, Google chose to showcase the people behind the brands rather than simply using their logos. Suddenly the content becomes more authentic and relatable.
Instead of using stock images, you can use photos of your employees, workshop, customers, clients, and partners for visual marketing campaigns. It is essential to ensure they are high quality and relevant to your context.
Connect with relevant influencers to leverage Influencer marketing. It is the best option to generate better results from your creative visuals. They help you boost trust among your audience.
Optimize Visual Content for Mobile Devices
Statista reports that presently, there are over 6.5 million smartphone users around the globe.
For many of these users, their mobile phones are the primary platform to search for information online, access social media channels, and consume entertainment.
If you want your visual marketing strategy to be impactful, every visual content you create must be optimized for the mobile platform. Ensure that images and videos are easily viewable on smaller screens.
Create high-quality visual marketing content that engages mobile users without affecting the page load time.
Optimize Visual Content for Visual Search
First, we used to search using keywords, then we had voice search, and now it’s time for visual tracking.
According to this latest report by Insider Intelligence, 83% of users showed interest in visual searches.
When you develop your visual marketing strategy, you can adopt various techniques to optimize your content for visual search. Some effective optical marketing techniques include:
- Add alt-text descriptions to comprehend the images better.
- Incorporate subtitles in videos to deliver a better experience for hard-of-hearing viewers and sound-off viewing.
- Write quality descriptive transcripts which are like the text version of your video. It includes the spoken and non-spoken descriptions of the video, like the location, elements of significance, sounds, and the like.
All these elements make your visual marketing efforts more effective and help develop a deeper bond with your audience.
Using an adequate amount of text description also enhances the effectiveness of your social media posts, videos, and blogs.
Include a Hook in Your Video Content
It would be best to brainstorm with your team on a good hook when creating reels, stories, video ads, or videos for various social media platforms.
Your video content must have an element to grip your audience’s attention and maintain it until the end of the video.
A hook could be a statement, question, or CTA that piques the viewer’s curiosity and nudges them to watch further. Ideally, the theme should be delivered in the initial few seconds of the video.
Let’s take this video by Jamie Oliver, for example.
He instantly relates to the viewer with his opening statement, ‘I know you want to get more veggies into your life.’ Then comes the hook when he says his pie is ‘packed full of the good stuff.’
Now you want to watch the rest of the video, don’t you?
You should include that hook in your videos to engage your audience for longer.
Ditch the Cliche and Align Visual Content with the Context
Your visual marketing strategy can be anything but boring!
Your target audience is flooded with various visual marketing content via emails, social media feeds, or blog posts. If you want them to stop and take note of your visual marketing content, you need to ditch the cliche.
Replace the stock images with interesting, intriguing, and thought-provoking visual elements. Align visual marketing strategies with your context to enhance engagement.
Here is a good example.
Instead of just listing its products, Samsung created this product gallery carousel to create a sense of intrigue in the audience. They want to visit the website to learn more about the products.
Ready to Create an Impressive Visual Marketing Strategy?
It would be safe to conclude that visual marketing is critical for brands big and small. But mundane, boring, and unimpressive visual content will yield no results.
The 11 expert-recommended visual marketing tips discussed above are aimed at giving you a new perspective on how to make your brand storytelling stand out and garner more engagement.
Incorporate these tips into your visual marketing strategy and elevate your digital marketing efforts to a new level for better ROI.
